Vote Early, Vote Often

New Jersey's presidential primary is over. The people have voted. In some instances, people got to vote twice...legally.

This muscular use of the franchise was the result of a wacky Superior Court decision. It permitted those who cast their ballots before Election Day for a candidate who was no longer running (think John Edwards or Fred Thompson) to vote again. A do-over, if you will.

Ocean County Superior Court Judge Vincent Grasso felt (it must have been a feeling because there was no legal basis for this decision) that it was unfair that some people voted for candidates who dropped out of the race. The decision affected people who voted by absentee ballot.

Implementing the decision required a lot of trust. First, we had to trust the claim of the absentee voter that he/she voted for a candidate no longer running. After all, the ruling wasn't intended to allow an absentee voter who voted for Clinton to switch to Obama. Second, we must trust that election officials can accurately locate and discard the original absentee ballot. Failure to do so would mean that an absentee voter not only got to vote twice, but also had both ballots counted. Or, if the wrong ballot was destroyed, then some other absentee voter was deprived of his/her vote.

Indeed, some election officials were convinced that they couldn't properly implement the decision, so they didn't. So, in some counties, absentee voters could change their votes, while absentee voters in other counties couldn't. Great system.

The court decision was absurd, but it served one useful purpose: It illustrated the danger of early voting, a current rage with many election reform advocates. Early voting allows voting to occur sometimes months before Election Day. In Oregon, more people vote by mail prior to Election Day than vote on Election Day itself.

Election Day is the culmination of a campaign. Under early voting, people who vote at the end of the process may possess more relevant and consequential information than those who vote before Election Day. Because absentee voting typically occurs only two or three weeks before Election Day, the problem of disparate and incomplete information isn't a big one. But in an early voting system where ballots are cast months before Election Day, the disparate and incomplete information problem becomes more real. We saw first-hand the problem early voting posses for presidential primaries, where the candidate field changes regularly.

But similar problems can occur in a General Election too. What if five weeks before Election Day a candidate is charged with a crime that bears directly on the office that he or she is seeking? I believe that there are other "caring" judges, like Vincent Grasso, who would take pity on the early voter who unwittingly voted for the indicted candidate. "It's not fair," Judge Sympathy of Equity County would opine, "so we must allow these poor folks to vote again."